Thursday, March 25, 2010

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History a Flash Point as States Debate Standards

As Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio rewrite their social studies standards, the expectations around history are stirring controversy. (March 25, 2010)

Principal-Training Portal Aims for Ease of Use

New Leaders for New Schools offers a range of online professional-development resources through its Effective Practice Incentive Community. (March 25, 2010)

UPDATED

NAEP Reading Results Deemed Disappointing

In the latest administration of the test, 8th graders gained 1 point, while 4th graders’ scores were unchanged from 2007.(March 24, 2010) | Comments (14)

Educators Protest Budget Cuts NEA - NEATODAY.org

NEA - NEATODAY.org

Show Us Your Signs! Educators Protest Budget Cuts

Public education supporters nationwide are signing up to protest devastating budget cuts

March 25, 2010 — Around the country educators, parents, students and other supporters of public education are standing up and saying "no!" to budget cuts that threaten schools. From New York to California, NEA's state affiliates have organized rallies to send a message to lawmakers: Don't cut public education or communities suffer. At each of these rallies, some of the loudest messages come from the signs that protesters carry. We've compiled some of the best, from rallies in Arizona, California, Georgia, New York, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Have some from your state? Upload them on NEA's Flickr photostream.Read more...

"Morning Joe" PowWOW: Education's "Great Expectations" - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

"Morning Joe" PowWOW: Education's "Great Expectations"

March 25, 2010 9:00 AM

Joe Scarborough & Mika Brzezinski Bring Out The Big Guns This Morning:
Mayor Bloomberg,
Gov. Jeb Bush,
John Legend,
Rev. Al Sharpton,
Mayor Cory Booker, Newark
Blair Taylor, L.A. Urban League

See videos below:
More To Come

Punishing Success, Gutting the Future � The Quick and the Ed

Punishing Succes, Gutting the Future

Two of the most successful state virtual schools, in Florida and Idaho, continue to race backwards.

The St. Petersburg Times reports that the supposedly reform-orientedFlorida legislature continues to propose cuts to the state-run Florida Virtual School. If enacted, the cuts would mean a total funding reduction of almost twenty percent over the past two years–much greater than cuts to traditional bricks & mortar schools. Ladies and gentlemen, your Race to the Top front runner!

The state-run Idaho Digital Learning Academy survived the Governor’s attempt to

Social Promotion Vs Retention - Perdaily.com

Social Promotion Vs Retention

"President Clinton (1998, 1999) called for an end to social promotion, which many educational professionals interpret as a directive to retain low achieving students."

With all the discussion about public education reform, there remains a wholly self-defeating practice continuing to be engaged in by the majority of parties to this debate. Even though they have the political and social capital to make themselves heard, they posit solutions that focus on goals without addressing the difficult foundational issues that remain unresolved and need to be addressed before attempting to propose a comprehension solution. Leaders in public education reform just ignore these issues and move on. In so doing they plant the seeds of assured failure in whatever model they propose, whether it be district, charter, pilot, small schools, or teacher centered models.

Dr. Shane R. Jimerson of the University of California at Santa Barbara, seems to have spent a considerable portion of his professional life studying the companion issues of grade retention and social promotion to see if either approach is better than the other in helping to assure ultimate student success. After a cursory view of the data he ha

A ‘Jail’ for Children Stirs a Ruckus in Brooklyn - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

A ‘Jail’ for Children Stirs a Ruckus in Brooklyn

By CARA BUCKLEY AND MICK MEENAN

Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesA maintenance worker prepared to paint over the word “Jail” at a playground at a public housing project in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

Playground controversies usually involve bickering parents, unruly dogs or bullies.

One exception is at the Tompkins Houses, a city housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where an orange jungle gym adorned with the word “Jail,” a cell door and prison bars has, six years after its installation, set off outrage in the neighborhood and the blogosphere, along with a hasty official response.

Children may play cops and robbers all the time, but putting a pretend jail in a public housing playground in a historically black community struck some residents as an insult.

Questions over textbook deals likely to resurface at tonight's Dallas school board meeting | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News

Questions over textbook deals likely to resurface at tonight's Dallas school board meeting | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News| Latest News

Questions over textbook deals likely to resurface at tonight's Dallas school board meeting

10:42 AM CDT on Thursday, March 25, 2010

By DIANE RADO / The Dallas Morning News
drado@dallasnews.com

With millions of dollars at stake, the drama over a textbook controversy is expected to continue at today’s Dallas school board meeting.

Trustees of the Dallas Independent School District are scheduled to vote on which publishers should get lucrative deals to provide more than 500,000 textbooks in literature and reading next school year.

Also Online

Irregularities emerge in Dallas ISD textbook selection process

Blogs: Dallas ISD | Education Front

Get local, state education news

Several irregularities have surfaced in the selection process, causing concern by educators, trustees and one major textbook company.

In one case, teachers across DISD voted overwhelming for publisher Houghton MifflinHarcourt’s books for elementary students, but the district’s textbook adoption committee recommended books by Pearson Education Inc., publishing as Scott Foresman.

Trustee Lew Blackburn is considering asking his colleagues to award the deal to Houghton Mifflin, to align with the teacher vote. The district’s textbook committee includes administrators and teachers and

Rochester teachers stage walk-out protest over budget, leaving after classes end - The Oakland Press News > Local News: The best place for news in and around Oakland County

Rochester teachers stage walk-out protest over budget, leaving after classes end

Published: Thursday, March 25, 2010

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By CONNIE CUELLAR
Special to The Oakland Press

Click to enlarge

Teachers in Rochester staged a “walk in-walk out” Wednesday to protest the administration’s approach to the district’s budget process.

The Rochester Education Association says teachers are distressed that central administration is pointing fingers at school employees while “making questionable decisions and sitting on what they consider a healthy fund surplus.”

Debra Hartman, manager of community relations and the Rochester Community Schools Foundation, said the district is facing a $14.6 million budget deficit for the 2010-11 school year.

“We have been in contract negotiations since last June when it expired, and have extended the contract in 90-day increments while talks are under way,” Hartman said. “On Monday night, we had a had a

UC Regents Meeting, Day Three � Student Activism

UC Regents Meeting, Day Three

by Angus Johnston

The University of California Regents enter the third day of their March meeting this morning, and though the meet hasn’t been met by the kind of huge mass protests that accompanied last November’s fee hikes, it has produced quite a bit of news — and some impressive new student mobilization.
On Tuesday, the Regents heard proposals for changes to university policy that would cut costs and increase revenue, many of which would likely provoke intense student opposition if implemented. The ideas put forward ranged from new tuition hikes and a doubling of out-of-state enrollment to the creation of a three-year undergraduate degree path. Students and workers weighed in on the changes in statements to the board, and “erupted in chants and yelling” at the end of the public comment period.
The Regents will receive formal recommendations on these issues at their July meeting.
Yesterday the Regents discussed — and heard student opinions on — the system’s recent wave of bias crimes and the underlying questions of campus climate and demographics. UC President Mark Yudof endorsed admissions reform in the course of that discussion, calling for a so-called “holistic” admissions approach, in which an applicant’s life experiences are taken into account, to be mandated on every campus. UC San Diego, which has a student body which is just 1.6% black, and which has seen a series of racist incidents in recent

Stimulus Package Saved Teacher Jobs, Scholars Say - Teacher Beat - Education Week

Stimulus Package Saved Teacher Jobs, Scholars Say

By Stephen Sawchuk on March 25, 2010 10:10 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has an important new analysis out on jobs data and the stimulus.

The bottom line: Although K-12 employment dropped by about 1.4 percent from 2009 to 2010, the federal economic-stimulus law paid for about 342,000 jobs over that time period, or 5.5 percent of total K-12 employment. In other words, it appears that the legislation did, in fact, save a significant number of teachers' jobs.

In all, the paper says, about 87,000 jobs were lost last year, in what is only the second decline ever in K-12 overall since 1993. But that's a lot fewer than the 600,000 that were projected.

Researchers Marguerite Roza, Chris Lozier, and Cristina Sepe collected employment data for the 21 states where it was available in 2010 to arrive at their estimate of a 1.4 percent decline in the workforce. Then they used a fiscal

Education Research Report: The effects of ten reading and mathematics software products on student achievement.

The effects of ten reading and mathematics software products on student achievement.

"Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings for Two Student Cohorts" randomly assigned teachers to either receive training and materials to incorporate commercial computer software into their curriculum or to continue using their regular curriculum.

Reading:

* First grade: Destination Reading®; Waterford Early Reading Program™; Headsprout®; PLATO®Focus

* Fourth grade: LeapTrack®; Academy of Reading®

Mathematics:

* Sixth grade: Larson’s Pre-algebra; PLATO®Achieve Now
* Algebra I: Cognitive Tutor® Algebra I; Larson’s Algebra

In classrooms assigned to use PLATO®Focus or Cognitive Tutor®, the assigned curriculum was used instead of the core curriculum. In classrooms assigned to use any of the other products, the assigned curriculum was used to supplement the core curriculum.

The study found a positive, statistically significant effect for one of the six reading products examined (LeapTrack®, 4th grade). The estimated

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